]]>Happy back-to-school season, teacher friends! Somehow 2018 is positively flying by, and it’s already time to prepare to head back into the classroom (if you’re not already back in it)! Recently, Teachers Pay Teachers hosted their annual back-to-school site-wide sale, and I ran a giveaway during that time to gift three teachers with TpT gift cards. My prompt on the giveaway post asked teachers to share how they plan to amplify student voices in the classroom this year, and I received some really awesome responses that I wanted to share with you in this blog post. Keep reading to get ideas for how to make sure your students get time to talk — and to be heard — in your class this school year.

NOTE: Some of the links below are Amazon Affiliate links for your convenience, and I may receive compensation if you click through and purchase one of the products. *

How I Worked to Amplify Student Voices in My Classroom

First, I want to share some of my own ideas for amplifying students’ voices. It wasn’t always easy or possible, but I did try my best to facilitate student-centered learning when I was still teaching, and that’s kind of the general foundation to amplify student voices. But, here are some more specific approaches I took:

I tried to implement strategies from Jim Fay and David Funk’s Teaching with Love and Logic*, which encourages giving kids choices as often as possible so that they feel more in control of what’s happening to and around them. For example, you might give them a choice to find spots to sit anywhere around the classroom or to stay seated at their desks for whole-class read aloud time, or you might give them the choice over which assignment or activity you display on the hallway bulletin board for others to see as they walk by.

I was a fan of projects that gave students a choice in what they did to complete the project, like my final project for The Diary of Anne Frank. In this project, students are presented with three different options for demonstrating their understanding of Anne, her diary, and her experiences during World War II, and they get to choose which one they’d like to complete.

When it came to reading in the classroom, I gave them choices about how we did the class read aloud time for our novels. Popcorn reading was always a favorite, but I sometimes gave them choices for other ways to get the read aloud time done (but if behavior or time was an issue, then I would read to the class).

When it felt appropriate because of maturity and behavior, I let students choose who to partner or group with for projects and activities.

Again, when it felt appropriate because of behavior, I let students choose where they wanted to sit for independent reading or novel read aloud time.

Although it was sometimes difficult to navigate, depending on the situation, I often tried to give students a chance to provide feedback on how things were going or how things were done. For example, I had a class in my last year of teaching, which I mentioned in this blog post, that struggled with behavior issues in my class literally the entire school year, even when my other three classes had mostly gotten it together and had improved leaps and bounds in maturity and behavior. On more than one occasion, I stopped teaching to ask this class questions along the lines of, “I know you’ve talked to your advisory teacher about how behavior plays out in this class and came up with ideas for how to improve it, which she passed on to me. I’ve tried doing x, y, and z, so why do you think behavior is still a struggle? What is the real issue for why behavior is an issue for you all in reading class?” This is a direct way to get students’ feedback, and in more dire situations like that one, they do tend to be honest.

Take time to just talk with your students! We often never really know what kind of home life and adult influence our students have outside of school, and taking the time to chat with them to better get to know who they are as individuals not only gives them the chance to talk and to learn how to communicate themselves more clearly (and probably to explore themselves, when we probe them with questions!), but it also shows them that we care and that we’re invested in them.

I could probably come up with more if I keep thinking about it, but instead, I’m going to transition to the comments shared by the teachers who commented on my giveaway post. Read on to get even more ideas!

More Ways to Amplify Student Voices in the Classroom

“Student voices are SO important! I love to celebrate each student for their responses in my class. We all give a quick cheer and move on. This tends to star the process of students speaking up because EVERY try is a good one. Next, I love to read books about different personalities and make sure to point out what I love about those personalities. Characters resonate with students. Lastly, I connect with students. It’s important to talk to them on a personal level so they gain your trust. When trust is there, they are more likely to speak up and voice their opinions.” — Ashley W.

“I plan on amplifying students’ voices by really making my classroom a community, where they know they can speak up and that they are being heard — making rules together, discussing and modeling how to do tasks, etc. I want my classroom to feel like a family!” — Sara D.

“By teaching them about diversity and acceptance” — Annie G.

“We always make rules together, but I saw somewhere about changing them into values. And a lot more sticky notes for them to share their thoughts and feelings.” — Brianna P.

“Giving them a variety of ways to share within and beyond our classroom, such as video, recording, drawing, and writing using apps like Seesaw and Flipgrid” — @wileyteaching

“I let my students free write about their weekend, poetry, their opinions, etc. And they have the opportunity to share aloud to the class using my golden microphone! We read the book Malala’s Magic Pencil* and learned about how our voices can help make a change!” — Jenn C.

“I plan to continue to strengthen their skills using PECS, their devices, and their voices so they are able to express more and more!!” — Melissa

“I plan to amplify my students’ voices by making rules together and by showing them in this classroom, everyone is accepted.” — JoAnna P.

“I literally have a microphone in my classroom and want to put in a platform this year, which encourages my students to share their work.” — @mrs_specialeducation

“Reading a variety of text/finding characters that each student can relate to! We also start each day with morning meeting to encourage listening and speaking to our peers.” — Megan L.

“Giving everyone a chance to speak and share their thoughts in a community circle” — @contesta500

“Adding a question of the day to my morning meeting time” — Brittany

“I plan to have more meaningful class meetings this year, where my class can open up about their thoughts, plans, and feelings with me and their classmates!” — Kara P.

“I’m an SLP, so it’s literally my job to help give kids a voice. But observe, wait, and listen is key.” — Danna B.

“Weekly council meetings led by students” — Liezel P.

“Giving everyone a chance to be heard and building a community” — @middleschoolmathteacher

“Allowing more time to share during morning meeting” — Whitney T.

“Creating a safe space for my kiddos to share their thoughts and feelings by doing more trust-building exercises” — Emma W.

“We do PBL, and that is a big step towards letting the students lead rather than the teacher lead. So, continue to let students lead lessons and their learning. Also, partnering up and sharing those thoughts that way.” — Sarah S.

“Building community and starting my day with sharing circles” — Terri

“I want to allow students to be co-constructors in their learning as much as possible, and it starts by listening.” — Erica B.

“Project-based learning” — Melissa C.

“Classroom management will be B I G for me this year, since I’m switching grades. It’s going to be a huge learning process, but I’m excited to figure out how to empower the firsties! I’m thinking they’re going to love my stage.” — Stephanie

“I want my kids to own their learning, so we are doing more guided exploring.” — Katie

“I got a QBall!! I’m so excited for engagement, speaking skills, and more with it!” — Katie B.

“Using GLAD strategies to have students teach their classmates” — Lisa

“Building trust” — Rebecca

“Genius hour and discussion time” — @hansonsworksofheart

“I love doing a 2-minute chat with each kid at least one time a week. It usually ends up being five minutes, but the relationships I built last year were fantastic!” — Kelsey

“Morning meeting and PBL” — @hsease

“Morning meeting and student autonomy share” — @inclasswithmrsm

“Morning meeting” — @bkraft05

“Morning and closing of the day meetings” — Lynette

“We have our character education time where we build relationships and grow our social relationships.” — Lori B.

“Classroom meetings” — Jill

“[I want to] amplify their voices by giving them opportunities to share things about their own culture and giving them a dedicated time to do so.” — Lauren L.

“Providing my students [with] appropriate ways to talk to one another” — Elyse

“I can’t wait to continue my ‘share ball’ this year! Every Monday, they get a chance to tell anything they want, and on Friday, they ask questions of each other. I love that it gives them the opportunity to speak in a fun, safe space!” — Emily T.

“Allow them time to lead, collaborate, and share with one another” — Mindy

“Accountable talk” — @teaching24_7

“I will be allowing more time to talk and less time for teacher-centered time. Math block and reading block are tough, but discovery activities are my goal, leaving me to facilitate and students to investigate!!” — Julie S.

“Accountable talk and growth mindset” — Heather

“I am taking an online course on AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) and planning different ways to incorporate ALL the voices!” — Liz

“Morning meetings” — Katie

“We have morning greeting sessions and breakfast.” — @teachingautism

“Restorative circles” — Teryl F.

“Creating student-made rubrics” — @zippadeezazz

I’m really loving all of the creative, loving ideas that other teachers shared! Many of these ideas in and of themselves convey a true desire to let students talk and to actually listen to them, and that is one of the most important things we can do as teachers. I hope this list has given you lots of food for thought about ways to amplify student voices in your classroom, no matter what time of the school year it is, because it’s never too late to start fresh with a new approach!

As a last thought, I chose to include this post in my Honest Educator Series because I hope, if we’re all being honest, that we can admit that sometimes (maybe even frequently), students’ voices are ignored or quieted in favor of the teacher (or whatever kind of educator you may be) taking the lead. There are a large number of obstacles to allowing students to be the guiding force in the classroom: time, learning disabilities, maturity, behavior, mandated curriculum, standards — and on, and on, and on. However, everything we do as educators is literally for the kids. We’re shaping their knowledge, their confidence, their maturity, their lives, and this is why their voices need to be the ones that we listen to. In honor of honesty, I hope that you can admit when you’re not making room for student-centered learning and will do something to change that.

Happy Teaching!

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* Leslie Auman is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon properties including, but not limited to, amazon.com, endless.com, myhabit.com, smallparts.com, or amazonwireless.com.

]]>http://leslieauman.com/54-ways-amplify-student-voices-classroom/feed/0How I Use You Need a Budget to Manage Business Financeshttp://leslieauman.com/how-i-use-you-need-a-budget-to-manage-business-finances/
http://leslieauman.com/how-i-use-you-need-a-budget-to-manage-business-finances/#respondSun, 15 Apr 2018 15:41:26 +0000http://leslieauman.com/?p=754The word “budget” was never much in my vocabulary until the last year or so. I struggled with math in school (and, therefore, other subjects that relied on math, such as statistics and economics), and budgeting just never quite made sense in my mind. I remember when my fiancé sat me down and adapted his…

The word “budget” was never much in my vocabulary until the last year or so. I struggled with math in school (and, therefore, other subjects that relied on math, such as statistics and economics), and budgeting just never quite made sense in my mind. I remember when my fiancé sat me down and adapted his budget spreadsheet in Excel to make a new version for me, and it was just…over my head. I’ve never been as good with money as I could be, but I’m not financially irresponsible, so I always managed to scrape by. Then, I learned about You Need a Budget* (also known as YNAB) – I don’t even remember how anymore – and decided to give it a try.

Why Did I Choose You Need a Budget?

Of course, You Need a Budget is not the only budgeting app that exists. I recall looking around at a few different options before settling on YNAB. They have tons of free online workshops you can sign up for to learn more about budgeting and how to get the most out of your YNAB subscription. You also get a 34-day trial for free, during which you receive emails every day with new tips and tricks for using the app. I really liked their features, which include customization of your budget dashboard, syncing different financial accounts (bank accounts, retirement accounts, credit cards, etc.), a mobile app, and reports to monitor your spending. Plus, they have a blog where they post articles about all different kinds of budgeting topics.

What I’m getting at here is that the team at You Need a Budget is trying to set up their users for success. There’s no shortage of resources for you to access to help you better understand how to use the app and to make a successful budget.

What Kind of YNAB Accounts Do I Have?

Personally, I have two YNAB accounts: a personal account and a business account. I signed up for the personal account first, and that was a learning curve for me. It took me quite a while to really customize my budget dashboard to have categories and line items that are actually applicable to me and my life. (But, that totally might have just been me being dense, because it took me a long time to realize that I could, you know, delete categories and line items that didn’t apply and replace them with new ones that do apply.) Like I said above, budgeting doesn’t come naturally to me, so it took a lot of trial and error for me personally to get things right. Plus, I use a credit union for my bank, not a large national bank, so sometimes there were syncing issues that took a while to sort out since my small credit union wasn’t as high priority as a national bank – not as many customers banking there in comparison. Then, my credit union revamped their online banking website, and that took a while to sort out with YNAB, as well.

However, the support team at You Need a Budget was friendly and professional every time I reached out to them about a syncing error. They always responded to let me know what was going on and gave me updates about how progress was going for their development team to reestablish the sync. I just recently communicated with their support to help me figure out an issue, and not only did their support representative answer my question but she also provided an example to teach me why this issue this happened.

Anyway, I’m digressing. It took me a while (like…a few months), because I wanted to make sure I really understood how to use You Need a Budget on my personal account before I created a separate account for my business finances. I considered having all of my personal and business bank accounts in one YNAB account, but I thought that might get confusing for me to keep track of everything, so I personally decided that separate was better for me.

In my business account, I only have my business checking and savings accounts synced. I don’t have a business credit card, and I don’t have a SEP IRA or anything like that where I pay into it from my business bank accounts. So, it’s just those two, and I try to remember to login at least a couple of times every week to sync any new transactions and make sure I’m on track with my budgeting. Below are screenshots of my budget dashboard so that you can see the categories and line items that I personally have set up in my YNAB account for my business.

The light blue lines are the categories, and then the white lines with the check boxes next to them are the individual line items. I’ll go through some of the line items and explain what they mean for me below.

Self-Employment Wages: I registered my business as a limited liability company back in December of 2016, but I still operate my business like a sole proprietorship. People who own LLCs can make what’s called the “S-election,” where they operate their business like an S-Corporation to get certain tax benefits. However, running your LLC like an S-Corp means that you have to do things like payroll and payroll taxes, which you don’t have to do when you continue to operate like a sole proprietorship. So, this line item is literally just me paying myself by transferring money from my business checking account to my personal checking account.

Quarterly Estimated Taxes vs. Savings for Estimated Taxes: paying quarterly estimated taxesI’ve written before about when you’re self-employed. The “Quarterly Estimated Taxes” line is used when I actually make my online payment via EFTPS to the IRS each quarter. The “Savings for Estimated Taxes” line is used throughout the quarter to keep track of how much money I’ve moved into my business savings account to save up to make that quarterly payment. When the time comes, I move the money from “Savings for Estimated Taxes” to “Quarterly Estimated Taxes.” I could (and probably should) just have a single line item for this, but…oh well.

Buffer Money: I try to keep a little bit of buffer money in my business checking account just in case something unexpected comes up.

Professional Services: This is the line I use when I have to pay my accountant for her services or when I need to make payments for things related to my LLC.

Gifts vs. Thank Yous for Client Referrals: I occasionally buy gifts for business purposes; for example, I’ve been working on little packages to send to my three mastermind group members. I used to mark any e-gift cards I sent clients to thank them for sending new clients my way as “Gifts,” but my accountant advised me to mark them as “Marketing and Advertising” instead, which is why that line item is in a different category.

Software – Monthly and Software – Annual: As you can see, I have several online subscriptions to various online tools that I use to run my business. For the monthly subscriptions, I just keep that money in my business checking, but for the annual subscriptions, I have goals set in YNAB for how much I need to set aside each month in order to have the full renewal amount available when the time comes for the annual renewal. Then, I move those funds each month to my savings account, and when it’s time to pay the renewal, I move it back to my checking to make the payment. The trick here is to always mark everything as the same category/line item when moving the funds back and forth between accounts so that you don’t lose track of it.

Business Meals: I don’t do much with this, but I should have a whole category dedicated to business travel expenses, which is where “Business Meals” could live instead of in a generic “Other” category. Currently, the only business travel I’ve done is to attend the Teachers Pay Teachers annual conferences, which is why I have the “TpT Conference Savings” line item right now (and all of the expenses I’ve made so far and all of the money I’ve saved so far to attend this year’s conference are attributed to that line item). But, if you do go out to lunch or something with the intent of having a business meeting while doing so, then that counts as a business expense, and you should be paying for it from your business bank account.

Everything else is pretty self-explanatory, I think, but if you have questions, do feel free to leave me a comment on this post and ask! I don’t actually use most of the line items regularly, but I have them for when I do have expenses that fall into those categories. One last thing I want to note is that in addition to being able to customize your budget dashboard with both new categories and new line items, you can also click and drag both categories and line items around to put them in a particular order. You can even click and drag line items to completely different categories.

How Can I Look at the Bigger Picture of My Business Spending?

You Need a Budget has a Reports tab where you can look at reports for your Spending, your Net Worth, and your Income vs. Expense. You can set each of these for specific time periods to see how you’re doing in a given month, quarter, or whatever time period you’d like to analyze. These reports can be really helpful in figuring out where you’re doing too much spending where you don’t really need to be spending, and it allows you to toggle between looking at totals and looking at trends. I particularly like looking at the Income vs. Expense report because it’s kind of like a profit and loss report in that it tells me if I’m earning more than I’m spending in a given month (but it’s always a bit off-putting in the months where I have to make my quarterly estimated tax payment to the IRS). Below is a screenshot of my Spending report for all of 2018 so far, and below it is the key for the categories.

As you can see, the great majority of my spending goes to my “Immediate Obligations” category – my self-employment wages, health insurance, quarterly estimated tax payments, etc. (Note that I blocked out the total amount spent, which is below the “All Categories” text.) But, it’s helpful to keep an eye on this to see where I’m doing spending where I shouldn’t really spend. For example, it’s not uncommon for Teacher-Sellers to realize that they’re spending way too much money on clip art and fonts for creating resources, but that’s not always beneficial for them – as in, they may not be earning enough back on the products using those clip art and fonts as compared to what they spent on them. This is why the Spending report is so helpful.

I’ve written about business finances in the past, so click here to check out that post, too!

Do you use YNAB? If not, how do you budget for your business? I’d love to learn how you do it, so leave me a comment!

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*Note: This is not a sponsored post, but I do recommend YNAB to others. If you sign up for a YNAB account using my referral link in this post, then I will receive a small commission.

]]>http://leslieauman.com/how-i-use-you-need-a-budget-to-manage-business-finances/feed/08 Reasons Why I Think I Failed as a Teacherhttp://leslieauman.com/8-reasons-why-think-failed-as-a-teacher/
http://leslieauman.com/8-reasons-why-think-failed-as-a-teacher/#commentsFri, 06 Apr 2018 21:45:04 +0000http://leslieauman.com/?p=736Hi, I’m Leslie. I used to be a middle school teacher. I quit after only three years of full-time teaching, and I haven’t returned. Even though I’m coming up on my three-year anniversary of when I left my teaching career, this is something about which I still feel embarrassment and, for some reason, shame. Teaching…

Hi, I’m Leslie. I used to be a middle school teacher. I quit after only three years of full-time teaching, and I haven’t returned. Even though I’m coming up on my three-year anniversary of when I left my teaching career, this is something about which I still feel embarrassment and, for some reason, shame. Teaching is a hard profession, and the term “hard” is multifaceted here. One of the reasons it’s hard is that, here in the U.S., the general social expectation is that teachers will give up everything to teach kids for laughably low salaries and be happy about it. So…when someone like me comes along and realizes that it’s just all too much and decides to leave…there’s a kind of judgment. This post is all about why I think I failed as a teacher and why it’s still hard for me to talk about.

These reasons that I think I failed as a teacher are listed in order of my perceived influence on my decision to leave my career. You may resonate with them, and you may not…and either one is fine. This is my story, but it’s also the launch of my new project that I’m calling the Honest Educator Series. I don’t think there’s really a space where teachers can go to vent their frustrations in a productive way and to find solutions to their problems, and I don’t think there’s really a space that unabashedly talks about these hard truths of teaching. These are the topics of conversation that are swept under the rug or that become the elephant in the room. I hope that by addressing them head-on, I can create a community of educators (not just teachers) who crave a space where they can talk freely about their struggles but also brainstorm solutions, who want to get support but also give support, and who aren’t afraid to face the realities of their career and, well, to be braver than I was.

NOTE: A couple of the links below are Amazon Affiliate links for your convenience, and I may receive compensation if you click through and purchase the products. *

#1) I was overwhelmed.

Ooooh, boy, this is probably an understatement. But, yes, I was incredibly overwhelmed. There is so much to do when you’re a teacher. So. Much. Curriculum mapping, unit planning, lesson planning, grading, documentation, accommodations for students with disabilities, parent communication, staff meetings, classroom decorating, classroom cleaning and organizing…oh, and teaching. You know, the actual lesson delivery. There’s more, and this doesn’t even go into the list of many, many hats that teachers wear (including but not limited to teacher, role model, parent figure, therapist, mentor, and advocate).

It’s not unique or unheard of for teachers to be overwhelmed, so this experience wasn’t isolated. I did try to stay on top of things as much as I could by doing things like getting in early and making copies for the next few days, trying to get my lesson plans organized at least a week ahead of time, and making grading shortcuts for myself. But there’s just so much to do, and with some of the other factors below playing, too, that generally speaking…I was overwhelmed.

#2) I usually lacked support, and I was usually in tough teaching environments.

Does this one sound familiar, too? Oh, wait, they probably all sound familiar. It just so happened that my Master of Education program at Ohio State partnered with Columbus City Schools, because they wanted students to have “urban teaching experience,” since those are so often the schools in dire need of great teachers. Prior to that, I actually worked in an after-school tutoring program in an elementary school in that same district. I thought that inner-city schools were the ones I wanted to teach in, until I got there as a full-time teacher, without a mentor teacher to support me. I was in inner-city charter schools two years of my teaching, and both years were really, really hard.

The first charter school was also my first year of teaching. There were four administrators, but only one of them really consistently and genuinely ever tried to help teachers with disciplinary issues, and the poor guy was run ragged by the end of the school year. I felt so lucky that his office was across the hall from my classroom, but he couldn’t be there for me all the time. As for the other administrators…two of them were really zero help, and the third sort of helped. So, there I was with a ton of hyper 6th graders, many of whom were immigrants from a few different African countries and were, therefore, English Language Learners. I also had the inclusion class, and thankfully, one of the special education teachers co-taught one of their class periods with me, which was a huge help, but she was also a first-year teacher. When a teaching position at a private school presented itself to me in July after that school year, I took it and ran.

The second charter school did a better job of supporting me, but when you only have three administrators for a school with something like 400 students and four grade levels, they can only do so much. The problem here was that our 7th grade class had experienced a lot of teacher turnover, including during the school year, so they were reallyhard on new-to-them teachers. We had a substitute come in to replace a teacher on my team while she took maternity leave, and she’d taught in this charter network in another city and was already familiar with the language and expectations, so the students had a lot more respect for her and knew they couldn’t get away with as much. But for those of us who were totally new to the network, trying to learn everything on the fly? Many of the students took advantage. I developed pretty bad anxiety this school year, and it was ultimately at the end of it that I chose to leave teaching entirely.

#3) I struggled with classroom management.

Maybe this one should have been higher on my list, but I think that if I hadn’t been so overwhelmed with all of the things teachers have to do and if I’d had better support from my administration that I might not have struggled so much with classroom management. It was weird (to me) because I usually had really great skill with building rapport with students. It was something for which my mentor teacher in my full-time student teaching position praised me. But, for whatever reason, I still struggled with classroom management. I tried everything I could think of, and I tried everything administrators suggested to me, and a lot of it didn’t work. I was at a loss, a lot of the time, and continued to attempt to employ techniques that at least sort of worked. I did try having an administrator sub in my class one day while I gave a test so I could go observe another teacher on my team, but he’d been at the school for years, so the kids came into 7th grade knowing him, so he had a leg up on me from the start. I tried some of the techniques he employed but didn’t get the same results.

#4) I was sexually harassed by three male students.

This…is a hard one to write, but this was a large reason I struggled at that last charter school I taught in. In fact, I’m not sure anyone in my personal life, except my fiancé, knows that this happened to me. Perhaps it should be higher on this list…I don’t know.

First, to clarify, I taught 7th grade reading when this happened. Fairly early in the year – definitely before winter break – the school social worker asked me for a meeting. When I got to her office, our principal was also there, so, of course, I was immediately nervous, thinking I was about to be disciplined for something or possibly even let go. As it turned out, they wanted to gently and privately let me know that a female student in one of my classes had gone to the school social worker and told her that three boys in that class were making sexual gestures behind my back during my class and that it had been going on for a while. For starters, it’s just wildly embarrassing to have 12- and 13-year-old students doing that to you, but I was also deeply embarrassed because I didn’t catch them myself. I never once saw any of them doing these things.

And then, the absolute worst part was that even though the social worker and principal told me they’d support me in addressing that class…I didn’t do it. I am so ashamed of myself for that to this day, because I continued to struggle with classroom management in that classroom literally until the last days of school. Those three boys were suspended, and all of them had different reactions. One of them hated me for the rest of the year, as if it was my fault that he did what he did and then that he got suspended for it. One of them apologized to me, along with his mother, who was crying she was so mortified. I had to work fairly closely with him as best I could, because he had (I think) unidentified learning disabilities and really struggled, but also didn’t care about school. The third alarmed me most of all, because he just looked several years older than he really was. I don’t think he or his mother ever apologized to me, and I trusted him the least. For the first couple of weeks after they came back to school, an administrator sat in my classroom while I taught that class, and I was super careful to walk around the perimeter of the room where I could have my eyes on the class for the rest of the year.

But, ultimately, I think my cowardice in not addressing the class while the boys were suspended was my downfall in terms of…classroom management, anxiety, mild panic attacks, and general success at that school. Maybe, if I’d had the courage to address the class about how I felt about the incident, the rest of the year would have gone more smoothly. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so anxious by the end of the school year that I was having mild panic attacks on Sundays over the thought of going into work on Mondays. Maybe I’d still be teaching today.

In this new era of #MeToo and #TimesUp, I wish I had said something back then. I wish I had been braver back then. However, at least I can be brave now by sharing this story and, I hope, empowering anyone else who has suffered through something like this to address it in the moment. It’s hard. It’s the hardest shit, I know, but you deserve to be in control of your own life.

If you’re not familiar with The Four Tendencies, it’s Gretchen Rubin’s work with personality types. She has studied this topic and narrowed it down to four personality types that everyone falls into: Upholder, Questioner, Obliger, and Rebel. You can get the book (or you can take the free online quiz here to get basic information) to learn more about your own Tendency. For me, however, I learned that I am an Obliger, which means that I almost always prioritize other people’s expectations for me above my expectations for myself. If you know me personally and happen to be reading this right now, then…you probably aren’t surprised.

What’s more important than simply recognizing that I put external expectations above internal expectations is something Ms. Rubin has termed “Obliger-Rebellion.” Basically, this is when you accept external expectations that you dislike, find monotonous or boring, etc. over and over until…you break, essentially. You decide that you’ve had enough, you can’t take it anymore, and you need out. This is what happens when Obligers unexpectedly quit jobs, leave marriages, and make other sudden and drastic life changes.

Sound familiar? This is, like, pretty much exactly what happened to me. I was overwhelmed and overworked, and I was unhappy…so I gave notice of my resignation, with the intention of not returning to teaching. But I didn’t know all of this back then; I only learned this within the last few months. I left teaching in 2015.

If you think (or know) that you’re an Obliger like me, Ms. Rubin does discuss ways to prevent Obliger-Rebellion from happening to you – once you understand why you do this. You can kind of safeguard yourself against it, and you can build a little community of support with your loved ones to help support you to try to prevent it from happening.

#6) I never got practice doing some aspects of the job that were hardest, most delicate, or most serious.

You learn a lot in teaching licensure programs, but usually, you learn a lot about teaching the actual content. You don’t learn much about classroom management, parent communication, colleague interactions, and other things of that nature. I got a little bit of actual practice with classroom management in my classes, but not much in the grand scheme of things. I also got some practice during my part-time and full-time student teaching, but that was with a mentor teacher in the classroom with me…and sometimes (especially in my part-time student teaching placement), the mentor teacher just handled it.

Basically, what I’m getting at is that I was never explicitly taught and given practice in communicating with parents and guardians – because as I learned in my first year of teaching, sometimes even good news isn’t easy to communicate, in communicating to parents and guardians when a child is failing, in handling with students who have suffered different forms of abuse, and the list goes on. I recently finished reading The Power of Moments*, and there’s a section in there where they share a story of a rabbi who realizes he needs to give his seminary students more realistic practice in dealing with difficult and delicate situations with congregants, such as a death in the family. He hired actors to come in and role play with the students, who were then much more effective and courageous in handling tragic situations when they’re on their own. I feel that this type of practice (although it would have embarrassed me greatly because role play makes me super uncomfortable and awkward-feeling) would be really beneficial to pre-service teachers.

#7) I sometimes worked with people who created toxic work environments.

Have you ever had a colleague who hid outside of classrooms and eavesdropped on the conversations happening inside? And, worse yet, then went and told the principal what she overheard? (It’s unclear if this was requested or offered freely.) Have you had colleagues spy on you for the principal because said principal thinks you’re “too loyal” to another colleague whom she’s ousting? Have you ever had a wildly manipulative principal who targets a couple of staff members and makes their lives hell? Have you had administrators who simply ignored the many and various behavior problems in the school? Have you ever witnessed a teacher freak out on a colleague, accusing her of talking about her behind her back in A BAR, in the doorway of the classroom when students were right there and clearly able to hear the whole conversation?

I’m more than willing to bet that you can answer yes to at least one of those questions – and they all happened to me at different points during my teaching career (and even before it professionally started). And, really, I’m sure I could come up with many more. I loved working with kids, as most teachers do, but working with the adults… It’s hard in the education field. There’s something about working in schools, around kids and teens all day, that makes some of the adult employees behave like the kids. There is no shortage of gossiping, rumor mongering, and bad behavior in education, which obviously creates a really toxic work environment.

Maybe if I had lucked out one year and didn’t have to deal with this – if I had been able to witness and work in a truly functional work environment, where everyone respects each other – it would have been different. The closest I got was my second year of teaching, and I really didn’t want to leave that school – but I did admittedly feel that my job was in some degree of jeopardy because of the aforementioned loyalty issue. It’s also when we decided to move halfway across the country, so…there was that. As it stands, though, every year brought either a lot of stress due to the work load or a toxic work environment or…both.

#8) I have an autoimmune thyroid disease, which has symptoms that made such a stressful career choice harder to bear.

I have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, or Hashimoto’s disease. It’s…a nuisance for me, but it’s much worse for others. Hashimoto’s can swing back and forth between hyperthyroidism (overactive thyroid) and hypothyroidism (underactive thyroid), but I think it tends toward the hypothyroid side – or at least it does for me. Some of the more common and persistent symptoms I deal with include difficulty losing or maintaining weight (but gaining weight – no problem!), fatigue and lethargy, brain fog, concentration issues, and cold hands and feet (no matter how warm it is outside). However, two issues that are also caused or influenced by hypothyroidism are depression and anxiety.

Autoimmune disease aside, mental health is really important. But in my case, my autoimmune disease was influencing – negatively – my mental health. Because I had a harder time dealing with the anxiety caused by my career, I was just constantly overwhelmed and stressed out. In short, teaching was harder for me personally to bear because I had a pre-existing health issue that impacted how I handled stress.

Wow. It is hard to put all of this out there. Perhaps I was too candid, but I believe more conversations like this need to happen in order for educators to better operate within their career. We all need to know and believe that there are other people out there who have been where we are, who have faced the same struggles we have, who have been in the trenches, and who possibly feel they have failed as a teacher, too. If nothing else, it helps boost morale. So, I hope that by sharing my story, I help another educator – maybe you – feel less alone and more understood. Your struggles are valid. Your feelings are valid. Don’t let anyone else – or yourself – make you think otherwise.

Because I don’t want to end this post on a completely somber or negative note, I want to acknowledge that I had many successes, big and small, throughout my teaching career. I didn’t make it as a teacher, but I did have a positive impact on many students’ lives, and although I was overwhelmed, I was on top of things and worked ahead most of the time. Although I struggle with continuing to feel embarrassed and ashamed of my decision to leave the career, I have many fond memories from my time as a teacher.

P.S. I’ve had this post in the back of my mind since I had my “new” headshots taken for my website, which was back in the fall of 2016. It’s now April 2018, and I’m just now writing and publishing the post. I’ve literally been wanting to use this specific photo for the graphics in this post since then. Baring your soul is a heavy feat.

In solidarity,

Pin it for later!

* Leslie Auman is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon properties including, but not limited to, amazon.com, endless.com, myhabit.com, smallparts.com, or amazonwireless.com.

]]>http://leslieauman.com/8-reasons-why-think-failed-as-a-teacher/feed/3Teaching Wonder in 6th Gradehttp://leslieauman.com/teaching-wonder-in-6th-grade/
http://leslieauman.com/teaching-wonder-in-6th-grade/#respondSun, 18 Mar 2018 11:00:13 +0000http://leslieauman.com/?p=532If you’ve been a human in the last several years, then you’re aware of the knockout, well-loved novel Wonder by R.J. Palacio. The book was first published in 2012, and I was in the second half of my M.Ed. program at that time. It just so happened that there were a few of us from my…

If you’ve been a human in the last several years, then you’re aware of the knockout, well-loved novel Wonder by R.J. Palacio. The book was first published in 2012, and I was in the second half of my M.Ed. program at that time. It just so happened that there were a few of us from my cohort all placed at the same middle school, with four of us actually on the same 6th grade team (and one more in the other 6th grade team). While I was in the social studies classroom on that team, one of my peers was in the ELA classroom, and she taught Wonder to our students that spring, when it was brand-spanking-new.

I remember her sharing what a great book it was and how our students were really enjoying it. Fast forward a few months, and I was a new hire at a charter school, again in a 6th grade classroom – except this time I was the English language arts teacher. I was going to have three classes twice per day for approximately 40-minute class periods: one period for reading and one period for writing and grammar. It was also up to me to choose which novels I was going to teach that school year, and you may have already guessed this, but…one of the novels I chose was Wonder.

While I know this isn’t the case in many schools and classrooms, I was fortunate enough that my administration gave me a budget for purchasing class sets of each novel I wanted to teach. Now, keep in mind that that was just a class set – 30 copies – not one for each student. But still, I was surprised and excited that they allowed me to choose whatever texts I wanted and didn’t make me teach novels they already owned from previous years. Because I was teaching at an inner-city charter school, where many of my students were English language learners and almost all of my students were below grade level in reading, I started the year with Wonder because it is, technically speaking, written at about a 4th grade reading level. I carefully examined the reading levels of the novels I chose and decided to teach them in order of easiest to hardest, under the thought process that – hopefully – by the end of the year, my students would be more prepared for the more challenging texts.

It turned out that much like our students during our full-time student teaching just a few months prior, my students loved this book and Auggie’s story. Honestly, for many of them, it was their favorite novel that we read that year (others included A Wrinkle in TimeThe Diary of Anne Frank and…I’m pretty sure there was a fourth, but I can’t remember it anymore – oops!). You can’t argue with the lessons taught in this book (more on that later), and while it obviously didn’t cure all (or even most, tbh) behavioral issues in the classroom, I appreciated that my students resonated with it and did have a lot of takeaways from it.

How I Taught Wonder in 6th Grade

Believe it or not, I actually taught this novel with an audiobook! I had an old iPod, as well as a speaker that I could plug it into. I can’t remember now exactly how, but somehow I came across the audiobook version of the novel, and I decided to use that and have my students follow along in their books. It turned out to be a great idea, because the audiobook had different people read the different parts – because not all eight parts of the book are from Auggie’s perspective. Via, Summer, Jack, Justin, and Miranda all get their own parts, and other people read those parts for the audiobook. My students really enjoyed getting to hear the different voices, and they liked the gravelly voice that was used for Auggie on our particular version of the audiobook.

Because the book is split into so many different parts, I opted to assess my students every so often. Two of the parts were long enough that they got their own assessment, but the rest I paired up. This was my way of checking to see how much students were comprehending as we read, and I used them as more of a formative assessment. That being said, the tests are short and sweet and have only one extended response question each – but every test does have two bonus multiple choice questions! You can check out each test in my Teachers Pay Teachers store using the links below:

Unfortunately, I can’t remember for sure how I ended this unit back when I actually taught it, but I think I had my students do a paper bag book report. It was probably something similar to this free lesson from Education World. I do recall students completing them and going through the process of displaying them on my hallway bulletin board. But, what I’ve done more recently is bundle all of those comprehension tests above and added in an exclusive summative assessment to the bundle: a creative writing project in which students come up with an extra chapter for the novel. Students must write from the perspective of a character who doesn’t already have a part in the book (suggestions are provided), and I’ve included rough draft writing paper, final draft writing paper, a teacher’s guide, student instructions, a graphic organizer, and a rubric for grading. Interested in grabbing the bundle for 20% off what you’d pay for these resources individually? Click here!

How have you taught Wonder by R.J. Palacio? In which grade level? I don’t think it could be taught past 6th grade, but teaching Wonder to my 6th graders worked really well for me!

]]>http://leslieauman.com/teaching-wonder-in-6th-grade/feed/0How I Converted Clients to Retainer Packageshttp://leslieauman.com/how-converted-clients-retainer-packages/
http://leslieauman.com/how-converted-clients-retainer-packages/#respondFri, 09 Mar 2018 12:00:23 +0000http://leslieauman.com/?p=142It’s hard to believe, but it’s been about a year-and-a-half since I started working from home full-time, running my virtual assistant business as my main focus and source of income. That was back in September of 2016, and I spent several weeks crunching the numbers and thinking about how best to make that happen. Prior…

It’s hard to believe, but it’s been about a year-and-a-half since I started working from home full-time, running my virtual assistant business as my main focus and source of income. That was back in September of 2016, and I spent several weeks crunching the numbers and thinking about how best to make that happen. Prior to working from home full-time, my virtual assistant business was run on simple straight hourly work, with a flat rate for all services. But, part of my plan to be able to work from home included switching from straight hourly to monthly retainer packages.

The straight hourly work was fine up until that point. I’d been in business for about a year, and I’d always felt that it was the easiest way to serve my clients without worrying about billing cycles or which services should maybe cost more than others because they’re more tedious, intensive, or whatever. I didn’t have to worry about which clients were on certain pricing structures versus others. However, I was also working a full-time job, and my VA business was a side hustle, so I wasn’t reliant on income from it to pay for my living expenses. When I thought more realistically about working from home full-time, it became clear that straight hourly work was not going to cut it as far as income was concerned.

Why? Well, as I said, my straight hourly pricing structure didn’t run on any particular billing cycle(s). I just sent clients another invoice for however many hours they wanted as they were getting close to running out of hours from their last invoice. There’s no real income security in that structure, because you don’t really know when money is going to be coming in. On one hand, clients may feel good about having you work x amount of time per week on their services or projects, which gives you an idea of when the hours might run out. Or, on the other hand, you may finish up one project for them, and then they don’t give you another one for a few weeks. You just can’t be sure how it will play out with straight hourly. As I learned more about monthly retainer packages, it became clear to me that that was the way I needed to go.

What Are Monthly Retainer Packages?

This is a pricing structure that you can use to invoice clients for a set number of hours on a specified billing cycle. Regardless of whether clients want a retainer package or straight hourly, I have a minimum of five hours per invoice. When clients choose a retainer package, I ask them to decide on a number of hours they’d like to purchase every month. Often, I give input on what I think would be sufficient based on the service(s) they want me to do. As an aside, I also allow clients to request to increase or decrease the number of hours they’re buying each month, as long as they give me enough notice before the next invoice, and I create an amendment to their contract stating the change in hours and when it will go into effect.

When it comes to billing cycles, I have two of them to try to simulate two “paychecks” per month, since I have bills due both at the beginning of the month and in the middle of the month. Those cycles are the 1st-1st and the 15th-15th, and I invoice clients five business days before the 1st and the 15th, with the due date being those dates. One last note about how I personally run my retainer packages is that if clients have any unused time at the end of the month, it rolls over into the next month (to be added on top of however many hours they buy for their retainer), and then they have six months to use up that leftover time before it expires. However, I personally count up the number of work days each month for each client and divide the number of hours purchased by that number of work days to try to prevent unused time at the end of the month.

How I Transitioned Clients to Retainer Packages

This was a fairly simple process, really, once I figured out how to do it. It just so happened that when I decided to make the transition to working from home full-time, I’d very recently signed a few new clients. I didn’t think it was fair to send them one invoice at my old rate and their next invoice at my new rate. So, here’s what I did:

I emailed each client explaining the transition I was about to make and the addition of retainers to my pricing structures. I also, obviously, explained how the retainers would work.

I asked each client to respond with a decision about whether they’d like to go onto a retainer or if they’d like to stay straight hourly. To be transparent, I did price my retainers less than straight hourly to incentivize clients to choose that, since guaranteed income every single month was (and is) my ultimate goal. That being said, the great majority of my clients chose the retainer.

I looked over my client list at that time and split it approximately in half, because about half of my clients had been working with me at least a few months, so those were the clients who got transitioned onto the retainer and the new pricing (because I increased my rates at the same time – although the retainer price was cheaper than my new rate for straight hourly, it was still an increase from what I charged previously) starting on October 1st. Then, I gave the other half of my clients – the newer ones – an additional month and transitioned them on November 1st. Because I notified clients about these changes in mid-August-ish, some clients had about six weeks to prepare for the adjustment, while the rest had about 10 weeks.

I would also like to encourage you to learn from my mistake: Don’t let your clients know if other clients will be transitioned to new pricing later than others. Because my niche is fairly small, and a lot of people within it know each other, I was trying to be transparent and dispel any rumors or gossip that may arise by letting my clients know that I was phasing these changes in for clients in two batches, but I did receive push-back on that from a client. In retrospect, I just shouldn’t have let any of them know that there were going to be two phases of the transition, and it very likely would have been fine.

And really, that was that! I can’t remember for sure now, as it’s been so long ago, but I may have lost a client or two in the transition – clients who couldn’t afford the rate increase. And, for me, that was okay because I’d started a wait list for my services by that point and already had a pretty sizable number of people on it. I’m still using these two pricing structures today (retainers and straight hourly), and it’s still true that all but one of my clients do monthly retainer packages. It’s such a relief to have that guaranteed income coming in twice per month, and it helps me stay on top of my systems and processes, including budgeting for both business and personal expenses!

If you’re a virtual assistant or other service-based business owner trying to figure out how to price your services, I hope this mini-tutorial helps!

]]>http://leslieauman.com/how-converted-clients-retainer-packages/feed/05 Online Business Tools You Needhttp://leslieauman.com/5-online-business-tools-you-need/
http://leslieauman.com/5-online-business-tools-you-need/#commentsWed, 07 Feb 2018 13:29:38 +0000http://leslieauman.com/?p=80I don’t think you need me to tell you that running a business is hard work. Like, really hard. It’s always hard, but I think it’s especially hard when you’re a solopreneur like me, because you have no one to fall back on, no one to swoop in when you can’t get to something, and no…

I don’t think you need me to tell you that running a business is hard work. Like, really hard. It’s always hard, but I think it’s especially hard when you’re a solopreneur like me, because you have no one to fall back on, no one to swoop in when you can’t get to something, and no one to tell you you’re doing a good job. With all of that in mind, it’s important to make things easier when and where you can, which is why online business tools are so important.

For this post, I’m sharing five online business tools I think every business owner needs…or, at the very least, should consider using. 😉 These are tools that help your business run smoothly from an administrative standpoint, so I think they’re mostly applicable to small business owners and solopreneurs in any field. Without further ado, here they are!

For starters, G Suite* used to be known as Google Apps for Work, so you may know it by that name. It’s an online business tool that allows you to utilize your business email address (for example, support@leslieauman.com) with the Gmail interface and all of the Google apps. So, although you’re using an email address with your website’s domain name, you still get allllllll the useful, functional, and easy-to-use apps that Google is known for while using the simple and familiar Gmail interface. G Suite* is super affordable at only $5/month/email address, and look at all these awesome things you’re getting with your business to help you run it for that low price!

How I use it:

Both of my business email addresses are set up on my G Suite account, and I have my inboxes customized with themes, color-coded labels/folders, and only the primary inbox (no Social, Promotions, etc.). I also utilize the following Google apps all. the. time:

Google Calendar

Google Drive

Google Sheets (which I often share with clients so we can both edit)

Google Docs (which I also often share with clients so we can both edit)

Google Keep

Google Hangouts

I really only use Google Drive for sharing Sheets and Docs with clients. I don’t use it often for file storage, but I do sometimes use it with clients to share files back and forth. Of course, there are many more apps that Google offers, but these are the ones I use most often, many on a daily basis.

#2) QuickBooks Online

What is it?

I’m sure you already know what QuickBooks is, since it’s been around forever, but as a refresher: QuickBooks is an online or desktop accounting and bookkeeping tool. It’s generally considered the most robust tool of its kind and is used by businesses of all sizes. You can buy QuickBooks Online so that you can access it anywhere, but it is a monthly subscription, or you can buy the desktop version for a one-time fee.

How I use it:

I do all of my invoicing, income tracking, expense tracking, bookkeeping, and other accounting tasks in QuickBooks Online. I create my invoices right in the software and send them to my clients; I prefer cards as the payment method, because I got tired of waiting 7-10 days to actually get my payments in my bank account just for the sake of the free ACH transfer. I have both my business checking and savings accounts synced, and every Friday, I update the latest transactions in the banking tab and categorize them appropriately (or ask my accountant for guidance when I need it). On a monthly basis, I reconcile both bank accounts. I also run a Profit & Loss report every so often to see how things are looking from a spending perspective. When I file taxes here soon, my accountant will use QuickBooks Online to run all the reports we need to make everything super easy (or so she says – not my realm of expertise!).

#3) Asana

What is it?

Asana is a free task management tool, although they do have a paid version if you want to upgrade which, of course, has more features than the free version. However, I’ve always used the free version and have no complaints and don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything!

How I use it:

I will be honest here: Asana has a learning curve! I almost gave up Asana back when I started using it, because to me, at least, it was not intuitive at all. On top of that, I couldn’t find any free tutorials or courses that taught how to use it…at that time. I’ve since come across Market Beautifully’s free Asana course, which goes over some basics of Asana. The videos in this free course total about 20 minutes, but then she has a paid course called Asana for the Entrepreneur that goes even more in-depth. I haven’t purchased Asana for the Entrepreneur yet, but I think I will at some point in the near future.

But! Back to how I use Asana: I use it like my client work to-do list, basically. You can create projects in Asana, and then within projects, you can create “Sections” and “Tasks.” So, I’ll often create Sections for clients, such as Tailwind, Proofreading and Editing, DMCA Notices, and so on, and then I’ll create more specific Tasks under those Section headings. You can assign the Tasks to someone (most likely yourself, although you can add other people to the free version of Asana, which I didn’t know until one of my clients added me to hers!), and then you can set due dates. For Tasks that need to recur every so often, you can set them to repeat – daily, weekly, and monthly are some of the options. Within the Task itself, you also have space to write a description, so if you have particular steps you need to take for something (for example, steps to clean up an old blog post) or if you have specific requirements from a client that you need to keep in mind (for example, what percentage of the client’s pins versus the percentage of other people’s pins they want to you to schedule in Tailwind), then you can type that into the description area, and it will always be there every time that Task repeats.

Some other quick things you can do in Asana: attach files for file sharing between you and a client or a team member, add Subtasks, write comments, and like comments or updates to a Task, like if a client uploads a file or writes you a comment about something. I know there’s a ton more to learn about Asana and how you can best use it, but this is the extent of my knowledge…for now!

Freedom is a website and app blocker. When you put in certain websites and apps that you don’t want to be able to access during a period of time so that you can focus on your work, you can turn on a block session, and then you won’t be able to access them!

How I use it:

I have to be honest here and admit that I’m not very good about using Freedom*. I really need to get back into the habit of using it! But, here’s generally how it works/how I use it:

Download the software to your computer (desktop or laptop or both) and/or install the app on your smartphone (iOS and Android).

Add your devices – computer, laptop, and/or smartphone.

Check out their default blocklists to see what websites/apps are already on there that you tend to frequent and get distracted with; they have a “Social” and a “Media” blocklist. Select any already on their default blocklist(s).

Add any additional websites you have issues with visiting while working. You can add these to their default blocklists, or you can create a new blocklist. For example, I’ve added a blog I tend to check for new posts almost every day and BuzzFeed (those dumb quizzes, they get me every time!).

Select which of your blocklists you want blocked for the session.

Select which of your devices you want your blocklists activated on for the session.

Calculate how many minutes you need your block to run. It doesn’t take hours and minutes, just minutes, so if you need the block to run for two-and-a-half hours, for example, you’d enter 150 minutes.

Click start!

I will admit that when I first signed up for Freedom* and tried to use it on my iPhone (back in late 2016/early 2017), it screwed up my apps. I can’t remember for sure now, since it was so long ago, but I think there were one or two apps that just stopped working, and I couldn’t figure out why, but it was because of the Freedom* app. There was some kind of glitch that even though the block session ended, those apps wouldn’t work. So, I deleted the app off my iPhone and deleted my iPhone as a device in my account, and those apps were working just fine again all of the sudden! They may have fixed it by now. I haven’t tried installing it on my Google Pixel.

The best part, though? Freedom* is really affordable. Their normal price is $29 for the year, but I signed up with a 40% off discount code that, for some reason, continues to be applied to my account, so I’ve only paid $17 per year so far. It’s not free, but it is super cheap!

#5) Dropbox

What is it?

Like QuickBooks up above, you probably already know what Dropbox is, but as a refresher: Dropbox is a cloud-based storage app. It’s a great way to back up your files in lieu of an external hard drive, and it comes in handy for file sharing with other people.

How I use it:

For a long time, I just had the free version of Dropbox, which I think was storage up to 5 GB. Then, one of my clients sent me a huge folder, and I was forced to upgrade to Dropbox Pro, which gives you 1 TB of storage space. I’ve since started uploading a lot of the documents and things from my computer to use it as backup (although I need to be better about that), so I’ve continued to subscribe to Dropbox Pro annually. I mainly use it as simple file storage, but I do have shared folders with several clients where, mainly, we share graphics for blog posts and social media, for example. I also have a folder for my business finances, which I’ve shared with my accountant so that she can access all of my business entity documents, tax documents, bank statements, and receipts and invoices as needed. I know they’ve rolled out some new features to try to compete, I think, with G Suite, but I don’t use them.

And there you have it! These are my personal top five online business tools that I think every business owner, no matter your field or business type, will benefit from using. What other online business tools would you add to this list? Let me know in the comments!

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* Leslie Auman is a participant in referral or affiliate programs for these subscription services, tools, and/or apps.

]]>http://leslieauman.com/5-online-business-tools-you-need/feed/2How to Make Spelling Fun for Kidshttp://leslieauman.com/make-spelling-fun-kids/
http://leslieauman.com/make-spelling-fun-kids/#respondTue, 16 Jan 2018 13:30:14 +0000http://leslieauman.com/?p=609As a middle school teacher, I didn’t usually have to explicitly teach spelling. However, I did have to explicitly teach spelling in my first year of teaching, when I taught 6th grade English language arts. I was a little thrown off by this, because I didn’t think that spelling was taught beyond elementary school, but it…

As a middle school teacher, I didn’t usually have to explicitly teach spelling. However, I did have to explicitly teach spelling in my first year of teaching, when I taught 6th grade English language arts. I was a little thrown off by this, because I didn’t think that spelling was taught beyond elementary school, but it was required of me, so I did it, obviously. But then, that begged the question of how to make spelling fun for kids? I think we all know that kids, no matter what age, are not jumping for joy to be assigned spelling homework.

NOTE: Some of the links below are Amazon Affiliate links for your convenience, and I may receive compensation if you click through and purchase one of the products. *

What Was My Spelling Curriculum?

During that school year, I purchased a spelling book to use for my “spelling curriculum,” because I was teaching at a charter school that year. Of course, this meant that I was required to teach something, but they didn’t actually have a curriculum for me to teach it. Thus, it was up to me to find something to use to teach it. I wish I still had the books I used so that I link them here for you, but alas, I don’t. But, they provided 20 spelling words per week, and they were often broken down by a “theme” of some kind – like compound words, homophones, and so on.

One way I used these books was that I’d copy some of the pages for each spelling “lesson” and assign them to students. The lessons had, if I’m remembering correctly, four pages of activities. I didn’t usually use all four, but I’d copy a couple of the pages from the book, make copies for all of my students, and pass them out. This was all well and good, but, you know, they weren’t exactly riveting. It was like, “Copy down each of your spelling words” and “Use each spelling word in a sentence” kind of things. I wanted to spice things up a little bit, you know? I wanted to make spelling fun for my students!

What Should You Do If You Don’t Have a Spelling Curriculum?

If you’re in the situation I was in, where you are required to teach spelling but have no curriculum provided for it, then one way to get spelling words to use is Spelling City. The website provides some spelling word lists for various grade levels, including compound words, academic vocabulary, and other categories of words. What’s more is that you can use Spelling City to help your students practice and even take quizzes. There’s a premium membership, as well, but I’m pretty certain you can still use certain features for free.

Another option is, of course, to shop on Amazon. When you search for “spelling practice workbook,”* a number of results come up, and you can filter down by grade level. These workbooks often add activities and printables, too, like the one I had back in my first year of teaching. The good news is that most of these workbooks are affordable, and if you’re given a budget from your school to buy classroom materials, this would be a great way to utilize that budget without spending too much money. If nothing else, they can at least provide you with lots of spelling words appropriate for the grade level you teach!

How Did I Make Spelling Fun for Kids?

At some point, I came up with spelling menus, or maybe you call them spelling choice boards. This was like a table of spelling activities, and my students could pick from the “menu” in order to do different fun activities each night for spelling homework. That was the only school I taught at where homework was not required, and it was even encouraged to keep homework light. I decided that the spelling would become the weekly homework, and everything else would be done in class. Therefore, this spelling menu idea I had is what turned into my students’ spelling homework every week.

I passed out the spelling menus on Mondays, and students were required to complete four activities from the menu: one each for Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, and Thursday night. Then, students were to turn in their completed menus and activities on Fridays, which were the days I gave the spelling tests. Thank goodness for spelling tests, am I right?! They’re SO easy and quick to grade! And I’m sure that my saintly boyfriend helped me out by grading many a spelling test that school year, bless him.

Like those pesky spelling workbooks I no longer have, I also no longer have the files for these spelling menus. This is a bummer, because I know I had some really fun and creative activities on there. Students who preferred to act like they didn’t like school in order to “look cool” told me they had fun doing the spelling practice with these choice boards. Since I was teaching in a particularly tough urban environment, I took comments like that as both compliments and wins!

How Can You Use Spelling Menus?

Don’t you fret, though, because I’ve been working on re-making these spelling menus. While I’ve had my Teachers Pay Teachers store for over four years now, I never had any seasonal or holiday resources. My big goal for 2018, when it comes to my Teachers Pay Teachers store, is to add two new seasonal or holiday resources every single month, and one way that I decided to tackle this goal was with my spelling choice boards. Voila! You now have a way to make spelling fun for kids WHILE having them actually practice their spelling words in legitimate, varied ways WHILE also celebrating a bit of the current season or holiday.

Now, I already described above how I chose to assign my students to complete the spelling choice boards. You can do it the same way I did, or perhaps you can give your students the new menus and homework assignment on Mondays and have them due the following Monday, which is also the day you test students on their words from the previous week. Or, you can do all of your spelling practice in class, which might be especially necessary for those of you who teach younger kiddos. Perhaps you have a spelling folder that your students keep in their desks, and you can give them the menu, and as they complete activities from the menu each day, they store them in the folder and then turn the whole folder in to you on the due date.

Looping back in the question of how these making spelling fun for kids, all of the activities on the menus are themed with the season or holiday they represent. For example, one of the activities on my winter spelling choice board says, “Write a letter to a friend or family member that describes your latest sledding adventure, using all of your spelling words once.” Another example, from the St. Patrick’s Day spelling menu, says, “Draw a rainbow large on your paper. Write your spelling words in alphabetical order inside the rainbow. Color it, too!” My hope was for these to be engaging, themed activities that students could do while practicing spelling to help break up the monotony a little bit. The activities include writing, composing poems and songs, drawing, and coloring. Plus, each menu has a “free choice” square on it, where students can choose do whatever spelling activity they want.

Grading is another question with spelling menus. Obviously, the whole point of spelling is for students to practice spelling the words the right way. I emphasized that because kids never seem to understand why they must practice spelling. It’s entirely up to you if you’d like to grade their spelling homework on accuracy, meaning that you check every single activity they completed to make sure they spelled every single spelling word right every single time, or if you’d like to simply grade based on completion. This is what I did when I was grading the spelling menus back in the day.

BUT! Surprise! My spelling menus come with a little built-in rubric below the menu to make grading quick and easy for you. This rubric is based on both completion and accuracy. You can check each box for “completed required number of activities,” “completed activities with quality,” and “spelling words correctly in all activities.” Then, there’s a line for you to write the grade. You can write a percentage, a number, or a letter grade – whatever the requirements are at your school. Of course, this means that students should turn the menu in with the completed activities. The directions I included on the menu instructs students to staple their completed activities to the menu before turning it all in to you. There’s also a direction to students to cross off the box of each activity they complete either by lightly coloring it in or by drawing an X in the box.

What about Spelling Tests?

I went ahead and included spelling test templates for tests of five words, 10 words, 15 words, or 20 words, depending on how many words you assign each week (or if you need to differentiate for students with IEPs or 504 plans or for English language learners). The templates have the numbered lines for the words, and at the bottom, there are lines for you to write how many words out of the total students spelled correctly and then for you to write the grade. I’m really loving these, because I personally hated having students turn in assignments or tests on notebook paper when I was teaching. Sometimes the paper wouldn’t have that ruffled edge from being torn out of a spiral notebook, which was wonderful, but other times…it would…which was terrible. Then, you couldn’t stack your papers correctly, and it was just a mess. But no more of those petty issues! Now you can print and make copies of these test templates and be on your merry way.

Now, here are some other details to note about these spelling choice boards:

I’ve made both black-and-white and color versions of both the menus and the test templates.

It’s in a secured PDF format, so you can download and print, but you can’t edit. This is to protect the fonts and clip art I used to create the resources so I’m in compliance with those artists’ terms of use.

I hope this wraps up any difficulties you may have been experiencing with assigning spelling practice! And, like it was for my students a few years ago, I hope that this is the solution that makes spelling fun for your kids. Enjoy, and please do tag me on Instagram when you use them in your classroom!

Happy Teaching,

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* Leslie Auman is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon properties including, but not limited to, amazon.com, endless.com, myhabit.com, smallparts.com, or amazonwireless.com.

]]>http://leslieauman.com/make-spelling-fun-kids/feed/05 Mindset Shifts for 2018http://leslieauman.com/5-mindset-shifts-for-2018/
http://leslieauman.com/5-mindset-shifts-for-2018/#respondTue, 09 Jan 2018 12:00:54 +0000http://leslieauman.com/?p=573I don’t think I’m in the minority when I say that 2017 was a pretty challenging year for me, both in my personal life and in my business life. During late fall/early winter in 2016, I was happily planning ahead for 2017 – with the help of Amber McCue’s Planathon event – and setting goals…

I don’t think I’m in the minority when I say that 2017 was a pretty challenging year for me, both in my personal life and in my business life. During late fall/early winter in 2016, I was happily planning ahead for 2017 – with the help of Amber McCue’s Planathon event – and setting goals for the year (for my business – I’ve never been too big on New Year’s resolutions and things like that). Into the first…oh, I don’t know, at least quarter of the year, this kind of optimism about how the year would go – my first full year working from home full-time – persisted. But then, around May or June, things started to go a bit downhill.

For the remainder of the year, I continued to worry, pinch pennies, and struggle. Now, don’t get me wrong – there were some truly awesome and exciting things that happened in 2017, like creating and launching (twice!) my Teacher-Seller Virtual Assistant School and then reorganizing it into a self-paced online course, surpassing my income goal for the year (which happens to be the most I’ve ever earned in a year from any job or combination of jobs), having my best month ever in my Teachers Pay Teachers store in November – and besting that again in December, celebrating with my best friend at her bachelorette weekend and then standing as a bridesmaid and watching her get married, traveling to Europe for a 2-week vacation, and learning that one of my best friends from college is pregnant with her first sweet little baby. So, you know, there were some really bright spots last year that certainly cannot – and will not – be ignored.

Nevertheless, I learned some tough lessons last year. I wasn’t very smart with my money in the first half of the year, and it led to a lot of stress and strain in the second half of the year. I have an autoimmune thyroid disease called Hahimoto’s thyroiditis, and I battled with some kind of low-level depression and hormonal imbalance issues, I think due to making too many changes to my medication in 2017 (some of which was out of my control, when the pharmacy I used to use failed to tell me that they were completely out of stock on my medication in all dosages and were back-ordered on it and didn’t know when they’d be getting more in…thanks!). Although my business grossed more last year than I’ve ever earned in a calendar year at any job, what I actually paid myself, according to my profit and loss report, was significantly less. Therefore, as we step into the early days of 2018, I think it’s time for a few mindset shifts.

NOTE: Some of the links below are Amazon Affiliate links for your convenience, and I may receive compensation if you click through and purchase one of the products. **

#1) Mindset Shifts: Money

I have suuuuuuuuch a terrible money mindset. Denise Duffield-Thomas of Lucky Bitch would be appalled, if she knew me. But, as I’ve already mentioned, I made some unwise spending choices – both with business and personal finances – in the first half of the year, which led to some major penny-pinching for about 3-4 months after we returned from our Europe trip in late August. (Thankfully, we’d been planning and saving for that trip since November of 2016, so I was prepared for that.) Now, what am I going to do about it? How can I change my money mindset?

Analyze all of the apps and tools I have monthly or annual subscriptions to and decide if it’s really working for my business. In some cases, it’s a tool like You Need a Budget* (YNAB), where it’s not actually making my business any money, but it IS helping me budget properly so I can stop being such a hot mess financially. In other cases, it’s tools like Tailwind*, where I’m expecting to see a return on my investment in it because of the content I’m sharing using its platform. I won’t name any names, but there are at least a couple of apps/tools I’ve been using that aren’t giving me an ROI or that aren’t actually helping my business, so when it comes time to renew those subscriptions in 2018…I won’t be doing that.

Budget, budget, budget! I started using YNAB* for my personal bank accounts first, and then I realized I could use it for my business, too, so I created a second account for my business bank accounts. I’ve never been great at budgeting, but I’ve put in some time to figure it out, and I think I’m finally on a good path. I’ve got my budget dashboard customized for things like monthly software subscriptions, annual software subscriptions, savings (for estimated taxes and, right now, for attending the Teachers Pay Teachers Conference this July), occasional business expenses (like my accountant and office supplies), immediate obligations (like paying myself and health insurance), charitable donations, marketing and advertising, Teachers Pay Teachers (for when I need to buy clip art and things like that for product creation), and then a miscellaneous “other” category that rarely gets used. I think this will be invaluable moving forward, because I’ll finally know what I need to save money for…and will actually save it appropriately!

I plan to increase my retirement contributions in 2018. After I left teaching, I rolled over my two state teacher retirement accounts into a Traditional IRA with an investment company. Then, my boyfriend came across Betterment*, which was doing really well for him, and I decided to roll over my Traditional IRA from that other company to Betterment. I’ve never been that great about contributing to retirement, but I did finally start making a small monthly contribution. At the end of December 2017, I set it to double starting on January 1st. Then, I created an SEP IRA with Betterment*, which is a type of IRA for people who are self-employed and/or are small business owners. I plan to contribute the same amount to that account each month as I am to my Traditional IRA. Between the two, it will be approximately 5% of my monthly income, which I hope to continue to increase over time as my business grows (or as my income grows, I should say).

Lastly, but most importantly, I need to change my mindset around money. I think that will be a really big help – and I think that’s why I was doing so well in the first half of 2017, because my money mindset was better. Then, all of the sudden, I started to see some bumps in the road and some obstacles to try to overcome, and that good money mindset vanished. I’d like to get back into reading DDT’s blog posts, and she’s published a book, as well, so I’m going to see if I can get that from my public library. I also want to reread some of the business books I already own, like Carrie Green’s She Means Business** and Cara Alwill Leyba’s Girl Code**. Those books always have a way of getting me fired up and improving my money mindset, so I need to return to that headspace. Instead of seeing myself as living from “paycheck to paycheck” (I don’t really get paychecks, since I’m self-employed, but you know what I mean), I need to stay focused on the bigger picture. I’ve had some success with manifestation/the law of attraction in the past, so I might try to get back into that again, too!

#2) Mindset Shifts: Workspace

My boyfriend and I bought our home in February of 2016, and I’m lucky enough that it has a big home office, right at the front of the house, with a big window. We debated a bit about who would actually get to use the home office – me or him – because at the time, I was still sort of working on my old real food blog, and I wanted to make sure I had a good window for photography and thought maybe the bigger of the two spare bedrooms would be better. In the end, I claimed the office, and my boyfriend got the larger of the two spare bedrooms to use as his game room. Soon, I bought some furniture: a tall bookshelf and an armoire, because the room doesn’t have a closet. Eventually, I also bought a standing desk that operates on a motor and an ergonomic stool for those times when I feel like lowering the desk and sitting.

But, this office, like most of the rest of the house, has tan-colored walls and a slightly lighter tan-colored ceiling. The blinds and light fixture are also brown. Our home was basically an investment property owned by a trust fund before we bought it, and it was, to our knowledge, always rented out and never lived in by the people who actually owned it. This explains why everything is brown. It’s a pretty home, and it was built in 2006, so it’s not that old, but…every room looks the same. After doing a lot of talk and no work, I did finally paint our guest bedroom back in the early summer of 2017, before we had guests staying in it three separate times in a span of two months. However, it was a lot of work because the walls are textured, and the ceiling is textured, too. I would love to paint my office entirely white – walls and ceiling – and make it bright and airy, but this room is bigger and has a taller ceiling than our guest bedroom, and I’m…not feeling up to it.

While I debate with myself about whether I want to paint my office (or really, whether I want to paint it myself or whether I want to look into hiring an interior painting company), I do think there are other things I can do to make the workspace more Leslie-friendly, more inspiring, and simply more fun to be in for 8-9 hours every day. I have some paintings that need to be framed and hung up. I also have a nice “corkboard” type of frame that I use as 50% happiness board and 50% vision board, and I would love to hang that up right above my desk so that it’s smack in front of my face all day. I wouldn’t mind getting rid of the two mismatched filing cabinets I have in here and replacing them with one larger, nicer filing cabinet. It needs cleaned up, too – I’ve got lots of stuff just sitting out on top of my old desk chair and on top of the filing cabinets, when really I need to find a home for those things and put them away properly. I’m also considering buying a fun coffee mug to use as my pen/highlighter holder, since my standing desk doesn’t have drawers – I’m just using a boring white mug we already had right now (maybe something fun like this or this, or maybe something more simple like this…you know, for future reference for myself, or if you’re looking for one, too). While I was reading a BuzzFeed article, I came across this sassy “crown catchall,” which I might just have to make an excuse to buy and add to my top-of-desk storage options, too…you know, for sticky note pads and things like that.

Generally speaking, I think sprucing up my office a bit and hanging up some décor will really help with the vibe in this space, and I think it will make it more enjoyable for me to actually work in here, since I usually spend all day by myself working away, while my boyfriend is at work (although I do have our dog and cat for company!). These little thing will probably help quite a bit with changing my mood and mindset while I’m working.

#3) Mindset Shifts: Health

Bet you didn’t expect to see this on the list, since it’s not immediately related to my business. However…it is. I mentioned having Hashimoto’s thyroiditis above, and I experienced a lot of struggles with it 2017, as I said. I’ve been going to see my doctor about every 2.5-3 months while we work on finding the right medication and then the right dosage of that medication to get my Hashimoto’s back under control. I also learned, during this last appointment that I had with her in mid-December, that I have an issue with Reverse T3, another thyroid hormone. My boyfriend has this same problem, and my Free T3 to Reverse T3 ratio is abnormally low. This is certainly another contributing factor to the struggles I’ve been dealing with since summertime. Therefore, it is, of course, on my mind to get these things back in optimal zones so that I feel better overall. However, it requires a mindset shift about my health: Rather than being frustrated that it’s all so out of whack and sad that I don’t feel good about myself, I need to shift to giving myself grace, allowing myself time for self-care, and nourishing and exercising my body in ways that feel good.

So, that leads me to the next mindset shift for my health: I’ve gotten back into doing my friend Allison’s 5 x 10 in 20 workouts. Back in the fall, I jumped on board to be part of the group that beta tested these workouts for her, which lasted six weeks. Then, during that time, I won a giveaway from her, where I won another free month of the workouts. After that, though, I was in serious penny-pinching, money-conserving mode, so I didn’t actually pay to get these beyond that (sorry, Allison!). She ran a deal on Cyber Monday, though, and I decided to sign up again, because my health is worth it, and I need to exercise (I’d cancelled my gym membership in the fall of 2017 because lifting doesn’t seem to agree with my body the way I desperately wish it would, and I could work out at home for free). If you’re curious what “5 x 10 in 20” stands for: five exercises in the workout, 10 reps of each exercise, and complete as many cycles of those five exercises at 10 reps in 20 minutes as you’re able. When your timer goes off at 20 minutes, you stop, no matter what. Plus, Allison’s designed all of these exercises so that they can be done anywhere – most of them are bodyweight moves, but some of them require “equipment” you definitely have at home, like a chair and a broom. In addition, she provides modifications if you have knee/hip/whatever issues and pregnancy modifications, and she always links to very short videos she’s made demonstrating each exercise so you know how to do it. They always kick my butt and make me break a good sweat! She emails three of these workouts every week – but I’ve been saving the emails in a folder in my inbox, so now I can cycle back through and do old workouts, too. I’m aiming to do six 5 x 10 in 20 workouts each week.

Lastly, my boyfriend got me a Fitbit Charge 2** for Christmas. This has been REALLY helpful in reminding me to get steps in every day. I’ve got notifications set to remind me to get at least 250 steps every hour. If I haven’t, then at 10 minutes to the hour, it vibrates and reminds me to go walk around the house. I can also track my sleep, which has been interesting (and I don’t often reach my goal of sleeping 8+ hours a night – womp womp). I have my daily step goal set at 6,500 steps, but I started out at 5,000. However, I often far surpassed that 5,000 steps in the first week I had the Fitbit, so I increased it. Basically, it just generally helps me track my activity every day to make sure I’m getting enough movement, enough activity, enough exercise…and I find it to be motivating to actually do those things. Oh, it also monitors my heart rate, helps me track how much water I’ve drank, and offers a few other features, including a 2-minute “relaxing” exercise, which I think is a breathing activity to help you de-stress and calm down (but I haven’t used that yet).

4) Mindset Shifts: Mindset

It’s so meta, right? Talking about mindset when you’re talking about…mindset shifts. In all seriousness, though, this is a big mindset shift I need to make in 2018. This is why I want to reread my business books (and find new ones to read), why I’m writing this post at all! Between my health issues and my personal financial crisis in the second half of 2017, I realized at the end of the year that I’d really just been going through the motions for a few months, at least as far as my virtual assistant business was concerned. I wasn’t doing anything to try to improve my business, to improve my practices, to grow my business. On the other hand, I spent the entire last quarter of 2017 improving my Teachers Pay Teachers store, and that paid off big time with achieving a new highest month ever and then besting that again the very next month. So, that was great and all, but otherwise, I was kind of stalled.

I think what I need is just to refresh myself. I downloaded this analysis planner to help me better track the growth of the TpT side of my business. I need to reread those business books (I’ve got two fiction novels checked out from the library right now, but once I’m done with those, I’m on it). I need to revisit my “ideas” journal and start getting some juices flowing again. It was this kind of optimism and positivity I had about my business in the first half of 2017 that totally fizzled in the second half of the year when my health got out of whack, when I was busy with traveling and then guests visiting us here, and when my personal financial crisis hit. I let all of those things distract me, but I can’t afford – literally – to let those distractions take over again. And then, I need to ask people to help keep me accountable to this mindset change. Thankfully, I started a mastermind group with three other wonderful TpT sellers in the fall, so they’ll be great at helping me with that. I’ve also got a couple other people I can rely on for accountability. This leads me to my last point…

5) Mindset Shifts: Obliger-ness

I recently read Gretchen Rubin’s new book, The Four Tendencies**. It’s a book about personality profiles, but darn it if it isn’t the most accurate one I’ve ever read. Gretchen really nailed it, and after taking her quiz, I’ve learned that I’m an Obliger (but I do seem to have some Questioner tendencies wiggling around below that). Obligers not only make up the biggest personality sector, according to Gretchen, but they also have the most written about them in her book. You see, Obligers tend to put everyone else above themselves – or, as she puts it, they tend to meet outer expectations spectacularly, but they struggle to meet inner expectations. This is why accountability is so important for me and for other Obligers: When other people give us expectations (e.g. a client gives me a project to complete), we can usually put our heads down, do the work, and get it done. But when we try to set expectations for ourselves, we often fail if we don’t have a system of accountability set up – someone to check in with and keep us on track. I now understand why sometimes, I can be really self-disciplined and other times, I can’t.

However, there’s one thing to keep in mind with Obligers: what Gretchen calls “Obliger-rebellion.” When there are outer expectations placed on Obligers that become too much, or that are viewed as unfair, or whatever the case may be, Obligers can and will eventually rebel against those outer expectations, often without addressing the issue with the other person or people involved. Gretchen explained that this can happen in small, quiet ways (like doing something you know annoys someone else) or in big, dramatic ways (like suddenly quitting your job or ending your marriage).

And this is why I want to embrace my Obliger-ness and really come to understand it. I want to be held accountable to changing my mindset and working through all of these things I’ve listed above, but I also want to avoid Obliger-rebellion. Now that I know what it is, I realize I’ve hit it many times – when I’ve been working myself too hard and end up totally vegging out in the evenings for days in a row, refusing to do any household chores or errands, for one example. Another example: when I quit teaching. Now that I know that such a concept as “Obliger-rebellion” exists, I realize that that’s what happened to my teaching career. Having this new knowledge and understanding now, I want to take care of myself, hold myself accountable in gentle (and sometimes not-so-gentle) ways to help me be successful and to avoid this burnout.

Phew! I know that was a lot, and if you’ve read all of this, thank you. I hope that it’s inspired you to look inward and consider what mindset shifts you can make – not just this year, but any time you feel it’s necessary (that’s the Questioner coming out in me – I don’t set much stock by set start dates for things like this – I just do them whenever I feel the need!). To help you do this, I’ve created a free resource that you can work through – either complete it right on your computer and save it or print it out and write on it (and maybe hang it up in front of your workspace?). Just click on the image below!

So, with that being said, I’d love to hear from you in the comments about what you’re changing about your mindset and your perspective!

Happy 2018,

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* Leslie Auman is a participant in referral or affiliate programs for these subscription services, tools, and/or apps.

** Leslie Auman is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon properties including, but not limited to, amazon.com, endless.com, myhabit.com, smallparts.com, or amazonwireless.com.

]]>http://leslieauman.com/5-mindset-shifts-for-2018/feed/02 Steps I Took to Improve My Teachers Pay Teachers Storehttp://leslieauman.com/2-steps-took-improve-teachers-pay-teachers-store/
http://leslieauman.com/2-steps-took-improve-teachers-pay-teachers-store/#respondTue, 26 Dec 2017 12:00:03 +0000http://leslieauman.com/?p=548Now, this is a story all about how…I started my Teachers Pay Teachers store. 😉 I began professionally teaching (as in, I had all of my degrees and a teaching license) during the 2012-2013 school year. I used TpT as a buyer during that school year, and it was, I think, at some point during…

Now, this is a story all about how…I started my Teachers Pay Teachers store. I began professionally teaching (as in, I had all of my degrees and a teaching license) during the 2012-2013 school year. I used TpT as a buyer during that school year, and it was, I think, at some point during 2013 that I switched from being a buyer to being a seller and started my store. I’m not sure exactly when I started my seller account, but I didn’t have any sales until the last quarter of 2013 – I know that from my data. And, as much as I wanted to make some extra income off of my store, I never really took it that seriously.

Sure, I uploaded the resources I made to use in my own classroom, but usually only during the summers, when I had time. I did try to let my colleagues know about my Teachers Pay Teachers store one school year, and I pretty quickly got scolded for doing that – it was frowned upon to promote yourself in such a way. So, that kind of taught me to keep my mouth shut about my store, and thankfully, because we teachers feel like we’re always walking on eggshells, I’d kept my real name completely out of my store name, so it was “anonymous” (to most other people, anyway). I’m not even sure if I had any inkling that some Teacher-Sellers were making a lot…I mean a lot…of money from their stores. I knew it was a way for me to earn some very passive side income, but that was about it.

How I Started Working with Teacher-Sellers

Then, fast forward to the summer of 2015. By this point, I’d decided to leave teaching and was trying to figure out what to do instead that hopefully uses my degrees. It was at this time that I stumbled upon the idea of becoming a virtual assistant, which, as you know, I ultimately decided to pursue. Without going into too much detail, I didn’t have very positive experiences teaching most of the years that I was professionally in the classroom. Between a lack of more knowledge and better experience to deal with student behavioral issues, problems within administration, my autoimmune thyroid disease, and other factors, teaching became really overwhelming for me, and that was why I decided to leave. So, I felt pretty jaded about it, and when I started my VA business, I really had no intentions of working with teacher bloggers, even though it was a niche I knew I could work in. Meg, whom I’ve mentioned in at least one other blog post and who mentored me while I set up my business, had told me that she used to work with teachers who had Teachers Pay Teachers stores, so that’s how I knew. I wanted to work with bloggers in the real food niche, because that was what I was really into at the time – I even had a real food/holistic lifestyle blog for a while.

However, I guess the Universe had other ideas, because when I officially “opened” for business on August 10, 2015, Meg referred my very first client to me, who had had to let her former VA go unexpectedly and needed to replace her quickly. And that’s how I ended up with a Teacher-Seller as my very first client on my very first day of business as a virtual assistant. I did have a couple of clients in the real food niche, for temporary projects, but I never really took off as a virtual assistant in that niche. I did, however, take off as a VA for Teacher-Sellers and got more and more clients from that niche. Eventually, I got over my jadedness about teaching and just accepted that this was now my niche. I also started working on projects for some of my clients that allowed me to learn just how much they were earning on Teachers Pay Teachers, and I was amazed. Of course, that information was always kept confidential, but I marveled at this new knowledge, nonetheless, and realized that if I whipped my own TpT store into shape, I could possibly achieve that kind of success, too.

How I Started Improving My Teachers Pay Teachers Store

Despite this new realization I had, I still didn’t do much to start improving my store. I think I worked on a couple of products and “updated” them, but I really didn’t know how to make them look all cute and appealing and fun like so many other Teacher-Sellers. Eventually, I got too busy between my full-time job at a print shop and my growing VA side business, and I just stopped putting any effort into my store. I continued to have sales, but I never marketed it, and I never tried to make it better. I decided to attend the Teachers Pay Teachers Conference in Orlando in 2016, less than a year after I started my business, and while I did learn some great information about getting better at TpT, I mainly used the conference as a way to network and get more clients so that I could leave my print shop job and work from home full-time (and I was successful in that endeavor).

At some point I think in 2016, I’d worked through an online course called the Teacher Creator’s Toolbox. I’d purchased it and then ignored it, as usual (sigh), but then she sent out an email that she was closing the course permanently and that we had until a certain deadline to access everything before it was made unavailable. So, I dutifully watched all the videos and learned new things…but I never really implemented them. Then, in the spring of 2017, I decided to enroll in TpT Focused Success*, which is an online course created by Shelly Rees. I don’t remember exactly how I came across the course, but I knew Shelly had presented at the Orlando conference about the type of things she teaches in the course, and it had great feedback. I also knew at least two of my clients at that time were in it.

Shelly’s TpT Focused Success* has been the game-changer for me. I’ll be the first to admit that even before she recently updated the course and put it on a new platform, I had only gotten through about half of the lessons…and I wasn’t really implementing much of what she taught. My VA business is my main source of income, and therefore, it needs to be my main focus. It varies slightly, but I often had anywhere from 32 to 38 hours of client work per week, and I was having a hard time figuring out how to make time for my own business – not only for working on my Teachers Pay Teachers store, but also for doing things like writing blog posts and marketing my business. I did finally decide to start dedicating an hour every morning, before I got into client work for the day, to my own business, and I’ve made a lot of progress that way.

But anyway, back to TpT Focused Success*. I’d worked through some of the lessons, I’d completed some of the workbook she provides with the course, but I wasn’t really implementing anything. What really got me started were the monthly challenges that she hosts for paid course members in the closed Facebook group for the course. I kept wanting to participate in one and couldn’t quite get on it. Then, the September challenge encouraged me to revamp and improve a couple of my products, which I did in full – toooootal revamps. From there, I started creating some new products that were similar to the ones I’d updated, but they were for other grade bands. I didn’t actually finish the September challenge, but it had gotten the ball rolling for me. In October, Shelly opened a new Facebook group and opened up the challenge to any Teacher-Sellers who wanted to join. It was a BINGO challenge, and it was a lot of fun. I finished enough to enter one of the giveaways and even completed a little more on the board. I was continuing make some progress in improving my store – yay! Then, in November, I updated two more old products and made four new ones to accompany it – my resources for the novel Wonder by R.J. Palacio. I admit that I was motivated by the release of the movie version of the story.

And now, here we are in December, and I’m again working my way through this month’s challenge. I’ve decided that my focus for 2018 really needs to be seasonal resources, which is hard for secondary grades, I think, because they’re just not used as often as they are in the elementary grades. However, it’s not impossible to do, and I’ve heard from more and more sellers that their seasonal resources not only provide a nice earnings boost in months that might otherwise be slow but that some of their seasonal resources are in their top best-sellers! So, that’s one of my main goals for next year: create seasonal resources (secret: I’ve already started this month).

How Improving My Store Has Impacted My Earnings

Since I finally started actually updating resources to improve my store in September, I’ve updated four old resources, and I’ve added 13 brand new resources, including my first-ever bundle. (Hint: These are the two steps referenced in the blog post title – updating old products and creating new ones!) I’m delighted to say that my sales are reflecting these improvements. In fact, November 2017 was my best month of all time! I surpassed what had been my previous best month and just kept going, and now in December, as of this writing, I’ve had an approximately 299% increase from December 2016 sales! Below are some graphs that show my sales over the last few months. You can see the slow progression of improvement, start to see where I was actively working to improve my store.

Do you see that? Except for the few days so far this month I didn’t have any sales (mostly Saturdays and then the days that teachers are on winter break) and the 16th, it looks like, almostevery single day so far has beaten that day in December of 2016! What’s even more fantastic is that I’ve quadrupled my sales this December from last December! I really do attribute this to Shelly’s course and monthly challenges. I’m a bit of a mess right now trying to juggle a lot of things, but I really do intend to restart the actual course lessons and start working my way back through them on her new platform. Now, of course, just updating old products and making new ones aren’t the only steps to take to improve your store. These have been the two steps that I personally have seen have the most impact for me, but a Teachers Pay Teachers store is a business, which means you also need to do things like marketing, advertising, and so on. Plus, Shelly’s course goes into a LOT more detail about smaller steps you should take with your products that will make a big impact!

I’m a pretty firm believer that you can start fresh, set new goals, and make changes at any time of year. You don’t need to wait until the start of the school year or the actual new year on January 1st. However, since it is the end of December, and the new year is coming up quick, maybe your goal can be joining TpT Focused Success and getting your Teachers Pay Teachers store on track*, too! Shelly has crafted a truly supportive, positive Facebook group for her members, and not only do we all comment and help each other, but Shelly is also active in there and is always quick to share her insight. She also recently added a moderator to help her with the group, Carla, who also has great knowledge and has improved her store through Shelly’s course, too. I promise that you won’t regret this decision – as long as you actually do the work of going through the lessons and making the changes!

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and Happy TpTing your way to an improved store!

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* Leslie Auman is an affiliate for the TpT Focused Success course created by Shelly Rees. Please note that if you enroll in the course using my affiliate link, I will receive a small commission.

]]>http://leslieauman.com/2-steps-took-improve-teachers-pay-teachers-store/feed/0How Do I Become a Virtual Assistant?http://leslieauman.com/how-do-i-become-a-virtual-assistant/
http://leslieauman.com/how-do-i-become-a-virtual-assistant/#respondTue, 12 Dec 2017 12:00:21 +0000http://leslieauman.com/?p=78I was just recently asked about this (again), so it seems like a timely post to write! I started my virtual assistant business in August of 2015, after my online acquaintance Meg Bateman commented on my post in a Facebook group I was in (for food bloggers) and told me to consider it. I grew…

I was just recently asked about this (again), so it seems like a timely post to write! I started my virtual assistant business in August of 2015, after my online acquaintance Meg Bateman commented on my post in a Facebook group I was in (for food bloggers) and told me to consider it. I grew my business part-time on the side while I worked a full-time job, and then, in September of 2016, I made the leap and started working from home full-time with my VA business as my main source of income. I’ve been fortunate enough to be doing that ever since!

NOTE: One of the links below is an Amazon Affiliate link for your convenience, and I may receive compensation if you click through and purchase the product. *

But, what I know you want to know more about is how I ended up here: How did I become a virtual assistant in the first place?

Well, like I said, I was in a Facebook group for real food bloggers (because I used to have a real food and healthy lifestyle blog), and I posted in there asking if anyone had insight as to whether the hourly rate I’d been offered to be a content editor for a popular website was fair. As I mentioned above, that’s when Meg commented on my post and suggested the idea of being a virtual assistant. She recommended The Bootstrap VA by Lisa Morosky*, which is an excellent resource when you have absolutely no idea how to start this kind of business. I bought the e-book and read it, and then I spent about five weeks going through the steps it outlined to start my business. Then, I’d decided that I’d officially be “open for business” on August 10, 2015 – and I signed my very first client that day!

You can do as I did and read Lisa’s e-book and use that to help you start up your business – it’s a really helpful tool, and she updates it regularly (it’s currently on its third edition). But, to give kind of a general outline of what needs to happen (without getting into buying anything first), keep reading!

Mindset

My first recommendation is to start changing your mindset: You need to start thinking about your future VA business as an actual business, and you need to think of yourself as a business owner. Because, like it or not, you will soon be a business owner and your own boss – woo! And you can be a friendly, competent person while also maintaining boundaries with clients as a business owner, which is super important. As we all know, not everyone is an intrinsically good person, and some people, unfortunately, may try to take advantage of you in various ways. So, start shifting that mindset and start mentally preparing to represent yourself as a business owner!

Ideal Client

The next thing you’ll want to think through is who your ideal client is. This means the type of person that you’ll truly find it a pleasure to work with, whose personality meshes with yours, and with whom you can happily co-exist in a VA-client relationship. The reality is that not every potential client is going to be a good fit for you. Some people will come along, and they will definitely throw up some red flags for you. You do not have to work with those people. I’ve had a few people cause red flags for me, and I’ve found a way to politely decline working with them. This is why identifying your ideal client is so important – not only does it help you realize who you want to work with, but it also helps you realize who you don’t want to work with.

Business Setup

Probably the most intimidating thing about this whole process is taking the steps to actually set up your business: deciding what type of business entity you want to be, opening business bank accounts, and so on. There are four types of business entities: sole proprietorship, limited liability corporation, S-corporation, and C-corporation. Just starting out, it should be totally fine to be a sole proprietor. You should check with your county about filing something called an assumed name certificate, which means you’ll officially put it on record that you’re a business. It will be something like Jane Smith doing business as Jane Smith Assisting. When it comes time to file taxes, you’ll do your normal Form 1040 like you would anyway, but you’ll do something called a Schedule C to file your business taxes. Speaking of taxes, you’ll need to make quarterly estimated tax payments, too. Eventually, when your business starts to make more money, it would probably be a good idea to register your business as an LLC. Personally, I didn’t do this until a couple of months after I started working from home full-time. You might also consider finding an accountant or a CPA (they’re not the same thing!) to at least consult with.

Goals

This speaks for itself, but just to clarify, you should have goals for your business. How many clients do you want to sign in the next three or six months? How much income are you hoping to earn from your business? How are you going to keep up with learning what you need to know to complete services for your clients? You get the idea.

Branding

I’m a stickler for branding, in case you can’t tell. When I re-branded my business after making the transition to working from home full-time, I very intentionally chose which fonts I wanted to use for my website and business, as well as the colors. I also carefully designed my own logos. These things are so important for brand recognition, and it helps your business seem more polished and professional to potential clients. Don’t skip this step!

Service Offerings

Of course, you have to decide which services you’re going to offer. It all depends on your ideal client (what does your ideal client need help with?) and what niche you decide to serve. Some services don’t make any sense in certain niches. Think about your strengths, think about what you actually like to do, and think about things you’re confident you can learn pretty quickly. There’s no point going into business for yourself if you decide to offer services that you hate or that you find boring and tedious. Choose things you enjoy doing!

Rates and Pricing Structures

Oooooh, we’re in for it now: money. Yep, you have to decide how much you want to charge for your services. It would be a good idea to try to do some research in your niche and get an idea of how much other VAs are charging, because it really does vary from niche to niche. In my niche, most VAs charge in the range of $20-40 per hour, depending on their experience and what the service is. But in other niches, it wouldn’t be unheard of to charge more. The same can be said for certain services that require really specific and extensive knowledge and experience, such as audio editing podcasts or helping clients set up and run webinars. You’ll also want to think through how you want to charge: hourly or packages? I offer what I call straight hourly, where clients can buy as many hours as they want/need (with a minimum of five hours per invoice) and use them up within six months, or else they expire. Then, I offer a different hourly option called retainer packages. Here, clients agree to buy the same number of hours every single month on a billing cycle of either the 1st-1st or the 15th-15th. I like this because it’s guaranteed income for me every single month, and I charge a little bit less for it to entice clients to choose that option (pro tip!). Then, you can do packages, where you do x amount of the service for a lump sum, no matter how long it takes you to complete it.

Online Tools

There are a tooooonnnnnn of online tools out there these days to help you run your business. You’ll want to think through some kind of task management and/or to-do list tool, an accounting tool, a schedule management tool (I just use a Google Sheet plus Toggl to track time), an online storage/file sharing tool (I use both Google Drive and Dropbox), and so on. I use G Suite** for my email, which also gives me all of the Google Apps. My favorites are Calendar, Sheets, Docs, and Keep. I use QuickBooks for my accounting, but I started out with FreshBooks. You’ll want to do some free trials, play around, and figure out what feels like the best fit for you.

Contract Agreement

The last thing you’ll need to come up with is your contract agreement. You should neverwork with a new client without having a contract signed, because it protects both of you if something should go wrong. Your contract should outline all of your business policies and any systems your clients need to know about. Mine includes things like which national holidays I take off, how I’ll notify clients about vacation, what my “business hours” are, how the contract can be terminated, how and when clients will make payments, how confidentiality will be maintained, and more. I also include a questionnaire at the end of my contract to help me learn a little more about my clients.

Phew! That was a lot of info! There’s one more thing I didn’t mention that you might be wondering about, which is getting clients. However, I’ve already written about that in this blog post, so head over there to find out what I have to say about that!

Like I said at the beginning, this is all just a general overview of how you can become a virtual assistant. If you’re interested in becoming a VA for my niche – Teachers Pay Teachers sellers – then I’m delighted to share that I do offer a couple of coaching services for people interested in investing the time to working with me to start their businesses. I done one-on-one coaching with two people, and then I created my Teacher-Seller Virtual Assistant School, which goes over everything outlined above in much more detail (please be sure to thoroughly read the description, as well as the Preview). I originally created it as a group coaching program, but due to constraints on my time because of all the other aspects of my business, I turned it into a self-paced online course. I’d love to hear from you if you have questions, so don’t hesitate to fill out the Contact form on my website’s home page!

Good luck in starting your business!

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* Leslie Auman is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon properties including, but not limited to, amazon.com, endless.com, myhabit.com, smallparts.com, or amazonwireless.com.